UK police pull Immunicity censorship circumvention website

Over the past year, the City of London Police have been working together with various anti piracy organisations and copyright holders to take down websites that offer or link to pirated content. They start by asking the affected website owners to go legit or shut down through warning letters. Those that don’t comply result in the police asking their domain registrars to suspend their domain names.

In the latest round of requests, the police asked the U.S. based domain name registrar eNom to suspend the domain names of several allegedly infringing sites, including Immunicity.org, piratereverse.info, kickassunblock.info and katunblock.com. Like the previous letters the police sent out, no court order has been obtained.

The City of London Police has no authority to order domain registrars to take action when there is no court order or warrant involved, but despite this, they claim they have launched an investigation in to the sites and are asking the domain registrar to cooperate. Their letter-headed request is usually enough for the registrar to take action, as in this latest round.

Unlike the other proxies that unblock specific websites such as The Pirate Bay, Immunicity is an censorship circumvention service that unblocks a range of torrent websites as well as proxies. It was originally set up to counter UK internet censorship blocklist without resorting to Tor or purchasing a VPN. With a browser setting change, the service worked transparently, so that when someone accessed a blocked domain in its list, the traffic would be routed through its server to provide access, giving the impression as if the site is not blocked.

From a quick check with a browser that we already had configured for Immunicity, its unblocking service is no longer working, at least not with thepiratebay.se domain.

Once again, authorities (and the corporations pulling their strings) are able to censor the net without the consent of the censored. If a website is truly doing something harmful, the police should at least be forced to get a court order. If they can just point at someone randomly and say "you're guilty, shut down now", then the whole point of the criminal justice system dies.